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posted by janrinok on Tuesday August 02 2016, @07:53PM   Printer-friendly

A new social network, Candid, will use machine learning to try and moderate posts:

We use a deep learning NLP (Natural Language Processing) algorithm, which basically looks at what you're saying and decides ... whether it's positive or negative. So it kind of classifies things as having a negative sentiment or a positive sentiment. It then gives it a score of how kind of strong your statement is — let's say you said something about someone or you threatened someone, it classifies that as saying, "Hey this is a very strong statement," because these kinds of categories are not good in terms of social discourse. And when we do that, we basically say if this thing has a score which is more than a particular level, a cut-off, then we basically take out the whole post. So whether it's self harm or like bullying or harassment, we look for certain phrases and the context of those phrases.

On the line between moderation and censorship

I mean, here is the thing between what is "loud free speech," quote-unquote, right? At some level you should be able to say what you want to say, but on another level, you also want to facilitate, you know, what I would say constructive social discussion. ... There is a kind of a trade-off or a fine line that you need to walk, because if you let everything in, you know the fear is that social discussion stops and it just becomes a name-calling game. And that's what happens if you just leave — like certain discussions, just let them be, don't pull things down — you will see they quickly devolve into people calling each other names and not having any kind of constructive conversations.

They've succeeded in getting some free press, if nothing else.


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  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday August 02 2016, @10:03PM

    by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday August 02 2016, @10:03PM (#383364)

    Before any social network automates like this, they need better infrastructure.

    I should be able to subscribe to one or more filter lists, much like adblock lets me subscribe to various filter lists. But instead of blocking (or allowing) ads, they would filter other users. And not just based on the user but based on any number of characteristics like the age of the account (assume new accounts are more likely to be spammers), or key words in the message, or the age of the message (I don't need to see one more damn trump tweet, but in a couple of months they might be useful to have around for historical reference), or even the list of other users that user has messaged (if they spend their days talking to nazis, I don't even want to waste my time on them) etc. If one of those filter lists comes from an AI system, then that's great. But I should be able to add as many other filter lists as I prefer.